The little cafe turned out to be in the courtyard. “The place’s o-out of the way. Am…ambush!” Max stated confidently.

“Why?”

“Simpler to ar…arrange it in a cafe! You have the schnepper?” It turned out that Athanasius did not have his schnepper. Only his clms, and even that was in the knapsack.

“Let’s do this! I’ll drop in and if I don’t appear in sixty seconds, run to save me!” Athanasius said and pushed the door.

When he came out ten minutes later, Max, huffing and puffing, was breaking off an iron rod from the fence. “Why so l-long?”

“They’re right at the entrance. Chatting!” Athanasius, embarrassed, started to justify himself.

Gulia and Nina were sitting at the second table from the door. Max was presented by Athanasius as “my friend Maximilian.” He himself did not know why he blurted out “Maximilian.” When he was nervous, his tongue accomplished unthinkable tricks.

“Athanasius showed us in the window how you broke the fence! It was so amusing! Nina even thought that your turtleneck would burst!” Gulia chirped.

On this remark “the friend Maximilian” sorted out which was which girl, and began to examine Nina unnoticeably. To his amazement, she turned out to be not bad. The horse lover Max would describe the colour of her hair as “rose grey” blond.

Athanasius was also surprised. Yesterday, when Gulia said that Nina was unhappy, he imagined to himself a rather skinny girl, whom they would support under the elbow. The “rose grey” blonde turned out to be rosy, excellently proportioned, but somewhat in the style of “Why did you lose my bow?”

The lost-bow style was manifested in that she batted her eyelashes, pouted her lips, and constantly uttered, “Why did you drag me here? And coffee without cognac here? You just watch, I’ll kick up a fuss. You’ll have to answer for everything!”

She liked the strong Max. Soon she began to throw little bread balls at him, nudged him with an elbow, and repeated, “You have terrible eyes! I’m certain you’re a terrible person!” The “terrible person” listened and was delighted. He reminded Athanasius of a large dog, which no one ever patted, but now suddenly they decided to be nice to.

The cafe was comfortable, with cheerful figures on the walls and the ceiling. An amusing family sat at the first table. The father was chewing with such caricature importance, as if eating up the chocolate cake was doing an enormous favour to the cake, the institution, and to humanity as a whole. The son huddled up to the mother and was an exact copy of her.

“A child looks like the one who loves him,” Athanasius summed it up and began to gauge whether this was so. This was his internal game. He brought forth a thesis, and then chose arguments “for” and “against.”

“Hey!” Gulia hailed him. “You’ve been stirring the tea for ten minutes already! Maybe you’ll stop?”

Athanasius came to. “Don’t pay any attention! I have a fit of contentment!” he explained.

Gulia had a short argument with the waiter that she would guess all the numbers of his student card and they would not have to pay for coffee. “It’s nothing!” Gulia said modestly. “But then I lose things all the time! Here Nina just finds things!”

Athanasius unnoticeably sent two roubles through a hole in his pocket into his boots and proposed to Nina to say where they were. She found them, slightly screwing up her face like a math professor whose multiplication table was being checked.

Max thought for a long time what to ask, then recalled that in school they stole his phys ed form from the locker room, and asked who needed it. The rose-grey blonde smiled coquettishly. Her face was unbelievably flexible and expressive, with dimples. These pits, like shots from mortar, appeared at a new place every time.

“No one. They simply dropped it out the window. But here the little soldier in the crack behind the heater, this is interesting. Do you remember, you cried all night?” It turned out Max remembered. He also began to stutter then, although they had a popular story in the family that the neighbour’s dog frightened him.

Then they went to stroll around the centre. Max, timid at first and holding Nina fearfully like a doorknob in a public sanitary facility, gradually grew bolder and proposed to show her how to break the sentry’s neck correctly so that he would not let out a squeak.

“Look, I’m squeaking! Squeak-squeak-squeak!” Nina immediately gave voice. A happy Max grabbed her by the neck.

Gulia and Athanasius were walking behind, not too close so that the violent pair would not bump into them.